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Valve's Steam License Causes Linux Packaging Concerns

11-15-2012, 11:10 AM

Phoronix: Valve's Steam License Causes Linux Packaging Concerns

Valve's initial roll-out of their Steam client for Linux is all centered around Ubuntu. With Ubuntu having the largest market-share on the Linux desktop, Valve is focusing upon proper Ubuntu support as their first priority. In the days that the Ubuntu/Debian package has been available of the Steam Linux Beta, it's already been reported to work on other Linux distributions. Some Linux distributions have also begun to package the Steam Linux binary for their own platforms, but now there's some concerns about doing this, at least from the Arch Linux camp...

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I tend to think that Steam has ZERO business being in Archlinux's Official repos. It should have been in the AUR, instead. By having it in the Arch User Repository, it could be downloaded directly from valve and then the .deb extracted, installed + any postinstall stuff via the PKGBUILD.

I'm actually quite surprised Steam would even be considered for the official repos, What's next having AutoDesk Maya 2013 in the official repos? lol.

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I tend to think that Steam has ZERO business being in Archlinux's Official repos. It should have been in the AUR, instead. By having it in the Arch User Repository, it could be downloaded directly from valve and then the .deb extracted, installed + any postinstall stuff via the PKGBUILD.

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goddammit i was in the middle of installing Arch and was excited to try out steam but i guess I'm too late.

You don't need Archlinux to try Steam. chances are that you can just extract the .deb, have a look through it's contents (ie: look at the dependencies, as you will have to manually install them. look at where all of the files are placed on install and look at the postinst for post-installation commands that will need to be run) and install it yourself (on whatever distro you are using).

I haven't bothered with Steam, but that is exactly how i got Lightworks to work (which like steam is being tested in Ubuntu and thus is using .deb). But getting it to work outside of Ubuntu took very little effort.

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I tend to think that Steam has ZERO business being in Archlinux's Official repos. It should have been in the AUR, instead. By having it in the Arch User Repository, it could be downloaded directly from valve and then the .deb extracted, installed + any postinstall stuff via the PKGBUILD.

I'm actually quite surprised Steam would even be considered for the official repos, What's next having AutoDesk Maya 2013 in the official repos? lol.

It was in the AUR, but since many people voted for it, so it came into the repos. Whats your problem?
btw it is still in the repos and imo it should be kept there.